Murder by the Ledger – Paperback

The tower of the village church has leaked for years, and the whole village has pulled together to pay for the repair. Retired churchwarden Gerald Whitlock keeps the fund’s ledger in tidy columns, and everyone trusts him to do it.

Then Gerald dies in a fall from the tower scaffolding, a tragedy everyone is ready to call an accident, and the ledger he guarded turns up with a gap in it. A gap thirty years old.

Flossie Fairweather has spent sixteen years with other people’s accounts, and an unexplained gap in a ledger is the sort of thing she cannot leave alone. She has a village that wants to stay polite, a grieving widow who will not say what she knows, and Inspector Tom Croft needing every scrap of evidence he can get.

As the scaffolding creaks and old friends start telling stories that do not quite match, Flossie realises the real question is not who wanted Gerald dead this week. It is who has been waiting thirty years for someone to look at the page.

A cozy English village mystery with a brass-bound ledger, a rooster with opinions about everything, and a murderer who was always nearer than anyone thought.